The Emergence and Development of the Danish Modal Particle Paradigm

This dissertation investigates the development of the main Danish modal particles jo, sgu, skam, nu, da, vel, nokand vist. In Modern Danish, these particles express contextualization instructions, that is, they express how theutterance relates to the interactive context. In addition to this common content core, they also share severalexpression features: they cannot be placed in the pre-field, they occupy the left-most adverbial position in themiddle field, they are obligatorily stressless, and they cannot constitute an answer alone. Finally, the modalparticles are structured in subparadigms whose members share a common semantic core and have the sametopological position relative to other modal particles.The aim of this dissertation is to trace the development of these modal particles. When do the modal particlesemerge, what meanings constitute their source meanings, and how can the transitions to the new meanings beexplained? In addition to this, I examine how the semantic changes correlate with topological changes and withgrammaticalization. Furthermore, I investigate the emergence of the modal particle paradigm as a whole andpresent a mechanism for the paradigmatic integration of new modal particles. I argue that already existing modalparticles facilitate the emergence of new modal particles based on analogy. This contributes to their semantic andformal alignment resulting in the emergence of the paradigmatic structure.My analysis of the development of the modal particles primarily follows a qualitative approach: I identify contextsthat indicate the conventional status of new meanings by ruling out older meanings or meanings already reckonedwith. Additionally, I reconstruct the meaning of the modal particle etymons based on information from historicaldictionaries, translations and language comparison.The results of the dissertation indicate that jo is the oldest modal particle, which begins to occur in the 16th century.This modal particle emerges based on a temporal meaning ‘always’ in argumentative bridging contexts as well aslanguage contact with Middle Low German and Early New High German as a case of contact-inducedgrammaticalization. I argue that this modal particle constitutes the proto-modal particle, and that it facilitates theemergence of other modal particles by analogy. For the remaining modal particles, similar argumentative bridgingcontexts can be identified, and language contact appears to play a role a recurring role.I argue that the development of the Danish modal particles can only be understood in an analysis that combinesthe perspective of the individual modal particle with that of the emerging paradigm as a whole.